What do managers do? Is national culture related to the activities that managers carry out?

Abstract

This study has been made in order to discover what the main tasks that managers do are and whether the manager’s culture influences in the frequency of the performance of these tasks. There are some schools that have tried to discover what do managers do, but among all these Mintzberg’s one stands out. It was the first author that made an empirical study measuring which tasks and in which frequency managers perform. In order to see if culture and what do managers do is related we are going to use two national culture dimensions. Hofstede’s Cultural dimensions and The Globe Project dimensions which both of them are renowned models. Also, for this study we obtained data from the OECD (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). This organization makes an assessment in areas such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving as well as use of skills among population from countries belonging to the OECD. After computing the correlation coefficients among the dimension and different tasks that managers do in their position, no remarkable conclusion can be made and therefore we cannot state that culture and managers tasks are related. The reason why our study is not conclusive is the low significance of the results, due to scarce data. It will be interesting to repeat this study in future years when the OECD offers more data about more countries, what will make our sample larger and therefore more significant results.